Slab!

We now have a slab! Much sooner than expected. Things look to be more or less in the right place, though we have yet to go out there with a tape measure. The slab was completed on Saturday 28th March.



Diggers digging on our block.



Pipes on our block - this is the right hand side of the block in the slab pictures, where the kitchen is.



This is actually another block nearby having the slab laid. But we are guessing that ours looked something like this.



And here is our slab! This is taken from the front corner of the garage.



And another picture of the slab, taken from the front of the house. Garage is on the left, and a pile of dirt at the back.

Site start scheduled

Site start has been scheduled for Monday 15th March!

Not much else to report apart from that. At least we will be back in Melbourne by the time the interesting stuff is happening (not that what's under the house isn't interesting, but we'll be around to watch things like bricks being laid).

The spa bath

Ok, it's time to put this episode on the record. When we chose our house we signed up for a promotion giving us a choice of the following four spa baths:

* 1915mm Ovelle Deluxe oval spa bath with tiled hob, hot pump, (6No) chrome plated recessed jets, (4No) mini adjustable jets and headrests.
* 1675mm Stylus Newbury rectangular island spa bath with tiled hob, hot pump and 6 white jets.
* 1800mm Stylus Newbury rectangular island spa bath (1800i) with tiled hob, hot pump and 6 white jets.
* 1850mm Tuscany rectangular spa bath with tiled hob, hot pump and coloured jets.'

We were told that we could have any of these, and naturally we chose the Ovelle, having the most features and also a nice oval shape. This selection was done in August 2009.

Just a few weeks ago we received an email "informing" us that we could not have the Ovelle as it was too large, and that we would be given the Newbury 1675 instead. That is quite a downgrade, and I replied (all correspondence was by email) that we are not happy with the change. Much to my surprise, the reply was that there was nothing we could do about it, and that we would get no compensation because it was a promotional item. I suggested other options like choosing a non-promotional spa bath with us paying for it, or even leaving the bath out altogether and installing one ourselves, but in every case the consultant tried to bludgeon us into accepting what was presented as our only option.

Email exchanges continued throughout the week with both us and the Metricon consultant getting more and more annoyed at each other until on Thursday I arranged a phone call for the following Friday morning to sort things out.

And that phone call was quite a surprise! Metricon said that they would offer us the Newbury 1800I, which is more spacious than the 1675 originally offered, and it also has the "I", which means that instead of 3 jets only on either side it has 12 jets plus 8 additional smaller jets. It's even better than the original one we were expecting to have. The consultant explained that the Ovelle really couldn't fit in our bathroom, and apologized for having told us originally that we could have it (this was the same person who did our colour consultation, including choice of spa bath).

So in the end everything turned out ok. We were even offered a free upgrade to chrome jets, which were included with the Ovelle but usually cost extra on the Newbury. But we learnt an important lesson - if something doesn't seem right, keep asking until you're satisfied. If we had given up we would have gotten the basic Newbury 1675.